Multidocument recording/reproduction apparatus, such as electrographic or magnetographic recording apparatus, typically employ a common medium for recording (or storing) the latent image of information, such as text and/or graphics, to be reproduced on a continuous web or separate sheets of copy material. It is often the case that the storage/printing medium takes the form of a rotating drum the surface of which is comprised of a material on which an image storage pattern is written at an imaging station located at a first tangential position around the surface of the drum, and subsequently reproduced or read out (printed) on a hard copy document at a printing station that is located at a second tangential position of the drum. Since the printing customarily involves the use of a toner applicator (decorator), a cleaning station is further disposed at a third tangential position around the drum.
Because of the relatively close proximity of the imaging and printing stations to one another and the fact that the drum cleaning (toner removal) station does not always perfectly remove unused (non document-transferred) toner or other foreign matter from the surface of the drum, the operation of the imaging station may be adversely affected, whereby information to be imaged may be imperfectly written onto the drum (e.g. blank data), so that the resulting copy produced at the printing station is unacceptable.